Do you have a twin? I have a couple of duplicates, it seems, or I once did. (Under my old name, the one I was given at birth, I had twins. My new, married name probably gives me a whole different set of people to be confused with.) This morning my box had an email sent to me by a fellow with the same last name as my maiden name, telling me "I love you, be down soon...." I wrote him back and said, "I would hate for the person you meant this for to not receive it." Last year, a family whose son I coached wrote me a heartfelt letter after he died, and sent it to another woman with my name who lives in another town nearby. She tracked them down and called them, and said she sent the letter back, but it never came back to the family, or on to me. They connected with me after hearing from her, but sometimes I wonder about that letter, about what it must have been like to open something with your name on it meant for some other version of you. Occasionally when I go to pick up a prescription I discover the pharmacist has prepared something for her, not for me, and I've had to start scrutinizing the labels. Sometimes I think I'll go try to find her and meet her for a cup of coffee.
Now that I've changed my last name it's really kind of strange to introduce myself. My first name, Scheherazade, is different enough from my common nickname, Sherry, that it's not obvious to everyone that they refer to the same person. I've mostly propagated my new married name through dentist offices and drivers' licenses and bank accounts and the college, but some of these people have told me that they need to hyphenate my name and just append the new name onto the end, or keep my old last name in the system in order to have continuity in their records. I want people who email me or try to look me up in the college's phone directory to be able to find someone if they remember meeting me a year or two ago under my old name. So this means that reasonably simple errands -- picking up a prescription, say, involve a long explanation. What's your name, they ask? And I tell them my first name and my last name, and then an alternate for each that they should look under. It's silly.